2012 FMQ Challenge: February

5022012

Nothing like throwing us in the deep end! 😉 This month’s FMQ challenge was from Diane Gaudynski, and it was feathers!! Feathers aren’t that hard to do, but they are terrifying for most beginning FMQ’ers — me included — which is why I was surprised they were put so early in the year. However, there could be a good reason for that — I reckon if beginning FMQ’ers can handle feathers, they’ll have the confidence to tackle pretty much anything.

Fortunately, I’ve been doing free-motion feathers in some shape or form for the past 12 months, and nearly all my feathers have been based on Diane’s method. I find them very therapeutic to do, as her method means you don’t have to travel over existing lines or think about ‘where to from here’. I struggled with feathers until I purchased and read her book.

So to this month’s challenge… After a string of horrendously hot days when going into the sewing room would’ve been like entering an oven, finally we had a most glorious day today, with a maximum of about 25C. It was time to follow Dian’s instructions exactly and practice my feathers!

I ended up doing three practice pieces on the one long quilt sandwich — one using a variegated Guterman Sulky rayon thread, one using a dark Robison-Anton rayon thread (so you can see the stitching in the photo!), and one using a neutral Madeira rayon thread. Despite using these different threads, the back shows the quilting much better than the front!

All quilting was done on my HQ Sweet Sixteen.

Here are some of the photos I took after I’d finished (click on a small image to show it much larger):

[…] it going in the opposite waves to create an irregular spine. Then I stitched my feathers using the Diane Gaudynski method of stitching each shape separately, then echoing the shapes about an eighth of an inch away to […]